QUESTION:

Today was the first day of school and I had quite a hard time with my first graders. I’m trying not to give consequences but my students did not respond very well when I asked them to identify their levels.  I also had a hard time coming up with questions to ask them when they were misbehaving.

RESPONSE:

Here’s a thought or two:

  • At this very early point in the year, when the children have only just been introduced to the Hierarchy, don’t even ask them what level they are on.  Instead, maintain a teaching mindset.  Keep your focus positive and constructive.  Re-teaching procedures will improve just about any situation in the early weeks and months of grade one.  The post, “Difficulties on the first day of school” gives more information on this topic.
  • If you feel you need to practice the skill of asking reflective questions, here’s a way to do that:   Try to respond to any question or comment from a student by asking a question of your own.  This is like taking a crash course in reflective questioning!  You will move your skill level along very quickly by challenging yourself in this way.  Think of it as a game!  Darlene, my teaching partner, and I tried this once.  We challenged ourselves to get through an entire morning by responding to students with questions only.

Child says:  Teacher, here’s a staple on the floor.
Teacher responds: What would be the best thing to do with that?

Child says: I want to eat two things for snack (when the directions were to eat just one.)
Teacher responds:  How will you feel at lunch time when you don’t have much left to eat?

Child says:  My pencil broke!
Teacher responds: What’s our procedure for getting a new pencil?

Child says:  Can I have that extra jelly bean leftover from the graph we made?
Teacher responds: How would the other kids feel if one child had more jelly beans than everyone else?

Child says: Can we go home soon?  Is school over yet?
Teacher responds: Sounds like you have plans for after school.  What are you going to do when you go home?

  • When we first tried using DWS in our classroom, Darlene and I often carried a page of questions with us in the classroom.  We even wrote the questions from Dr. Marshall’s book on charts and put them high up on the wall––that way we could refer to them whenever we needed to.  Since our grade one students couldn’t read them in September, they didn’t pay any attention to them.  These charts helped us a lot until the skill of reflective questioning became more automatic for us.

A related post:

Can you give me some examples of reflective questions?

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Posted In: Reflection
posted On: July 26, 2009: 3:40 pm: By Kerry Weisner
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